The objective of the activity is to design and demonstrate solutions for compact and energy efficient Machine to Machine(M2M) user terminals for direct access via satellite. The aim is to jointly optimize the antenna architecture together with the novel access schemes at physical and access layer for global access network targeting low duty cycle and low volume traffic in one or multiple frequency bands.Targeted Improvements:Enabling resource sharing among a large number of uncoordinated nodes (M2M terminalsin the excess of 10000 units), both on the inbound and outbound channelsImproving significantly the energy management (by a factorof at least 2).Description:There has been promising development of physical layer and MAC layer schemes for asynchronous terminals transmitting short messages. Performance results in terms of the throughput and delay show between 60% to 90% improvement in the system overall capacity compared to state-of-the-art schemes (and three orders of magnitude improvement with respect to classical ALOHA random access) while maintaining similar complexity of the user terminal. The technique will also allow to reduce the peak power required to achieve a given throughput.To improve the flexibility for the end user multi-frequency user terminals may be targeted. A modular approach for building the terminal antenna is also of interest as this gives the user the options to adapt the gain of theantenna to different use cases.To comply with these antenna needs, several technologies shall be considered. Planar (array) antennas possibly using cost-effective inkjet-printing technologies as well as met surface antennas. For M2M applications also the low maintenance is an important issue. Often these terminals are in remote locations and therefore an antenna without moving parts is preferred (electronic pointing if needed). Other available technologies like SOLANT, integrating the antenna with the solar panel, could be of interest as well to reduce size of the terminal and to cope better with the harsh environment with extreme winds.The activitywill include a design, development and validation of a full prototype.

If you wish to access the documents related to the Invitation to Tender, you have to log in to the ESA Portal.